Writerly Ambitions
by timunderwood9
Summary: Elizabeth became a novelist after she was sent to London, now that her sisters have married she returns to Longbourn. Mr. Darcy has spent the last years searching for a wife who meets all the requirements on his list. But none of the women he meet feel right. What will happen when they meet at Netherfield? SAMPLE UNTIL 2021
1. Chapter 1

PROLOGUE

1820

Two dear friends galloped up a hill in Hertfordshire to overlook the red brick manor house and ripe fields waving with wheat of a substantial estate.

"Well, well, Darcy, do you have another disapproving opinion?" Bingley said, his old grin returning. "I say Netherfield is a fine place, promising in essentials. A little run down — but the price is run down just as much."

Mr. Darcy shifted on the broad back of his horse. He looked down on the fine building in three stories. White marble columns framed the main entrance and the large portico, a wide spread of fields all around surrounded the building.

There were fences unrepaired, spots where the wheat was spotty in the lower areas because the drainage had probably not been cleared, pathways overgrown with weeds.

Years before Darcy would have counselled his friend against taking such an estate, no matter how favorable the price, not believing him sufficient to the task of putting it back into order. But over the years Mr. Bingley had grown.

"Come on," Bingley encouraged with a laugh. "You are full of enough complaints upon the land to send that Mr. Morris who showed it to us into apoplexy."

"On the contrary, what had been in my mind was this: You can manage this place. You'll be a good master." Darcy smiled wryly at his friend. "But I dare say you do not need me to say as much."

Bingley leaned over the pommel of his saddle. "Isabella and I, we always planned to do it. Actually buy an estate. Fulfill the ancestor's dream. But we never took the time away from the parties and the ah… other fun."

Six months had passed since the death of Bingley's wife in childbed. He no longer dressed entirely in black, but Bingley was still clad in somber greys, and he always kept a thick black silk ribbon around his wrist.

"I miss her as well. Not a thousandth part so much as you, but you chose well when you married her."

"By chance. Entirely by chance." Bingley laughed and pushed himself higher in the saddle to look around from side to side. The estate's marble portico gleamed almost reddish gold in the fading afternoon sun. "I nearly took this very estate — to let, not buy — before I met Isabella. Had an appointment to ride down from town, meet the estate agent… and lightning struck. Saw her the night before, and I forgot entirely about the matter."

"You were convinced she was the most beautiful angel you had ever seen in your life — I remember the illegible letter you penned to me the next morning." Darcy shook his head fondly at his old friend. "You were not yet the most responsible gentleman in the world."

"Nay?" Bingley grinned broadly. "Izzie helped me grow. She still does, looking down on me from up there, and wagging her finger anytime I do something stupid."

Neither gentleman said anything for a span as their horses calmly shifted their feet on the soft grasses.

"So when will you marry, dear chap?" Bingley spoke unexpectedly and grinned at Darcy's expression. "Eh? Izzie is no longer round to play matchmaker. My obligation now."

Darcy laughed and clicked his horse into a canter. "Race you to the estate."

Bingley whooped and chased after him.

* * *

Chapter One

A week before the settlement of Mr. Charles Bingley, accompanied for a time by that fine fellow, his estimable friend Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, into the neighborhood of Meryton, yet one other person arrived in the environs of that aforementioned market town from that great sinful city whose name is London.

Following a significant absence of many years from her home county, Miss Elizabeth Bennet rolled towards her one time home in the well sprung and supple new Bennet carriage her mother had sent unto London to fetch her daughter.

The gravelly roll of the wheels was a familiar old sound.

It was cold in the carriage, but Elizabeth kept the window open so she could see more easily everything in the half familiar and a quarter forgotten landscape. Elizabeth had not seen her home territory since those fated weeks during her fateful twentieth year.

She giggled inwardly to herself; these days, ever since Elizabeth had acquired notable success as an author, when she spoke to herself she often talked like a silly melodramatic book.

She had been expelled from the wild woods, furrowed fields and… cold creeks of the country county of her birth when scandal exploded, like a bonfire on Guy Fawkes Day, after she had been trapped alone in a hunting lodge during a blizzard for two whole days with that darling of stupid and silly girls, Mr. George Wickham.

Ah, Wicky.

An annoyed and disgusted expression went over Elizabeth's face, like she'd just stepped with a new pair of shoes into a deep pile of horse muck — unknown to Elizabeth, this was the expression her face took every time the memory of that thinly charming individual imposed itself on her like the gentleman had attempted to impose on her.

What ever happened to Wicky?

He'd been quite put out when Elizabeth absolutely refused to let him have any "waggy entertainment" — "Be a nice, sweet girl," he'd said. "It shan't hurt at all. You'll like it very much. No one will find out." — during the duration of that stay. She'd been required to make the point that she lacked any interest with the sharp edge of her knee to his groin before he accepted her polite demurral.

Mr. Wickham's revenge was to spread scandalous stories about their lascivious and lewd deeds.

The truth of those two days had been rather less pleasant than what Elizabeth imagined a two days' tryst filled with animal concourse between a man and a woman would have been — the two of them spent thirty and six hours shivering on opposite sides of the freezing room. Elizabeth slept not a wink the entire time, terrified of what Mr. Wickham might do if he could catch her completely off guard.

He snored with some comfort and the only horsehair blanket in the hunting lodge.

The yet young woman — not yet thirty! And a writer of modest repute — shook away those recollections of unpleasant past moments.

Rather she preferred to gaze with growing excitement upon the nostalgic haunts of childhood days. There Oakham Mount, from which you could see clear for many miles around. There the Gouldings' farm. There Mr. Long's fine house — no, that gentleman had not remained in place awaiting Elizabeth's return, and rather had removed himself and his wife to a retirement in Bath, and the house was now rented, though Elizabeth could not recall the name of the family Mr. Long had let his modest pile out to.

And Meryton.

Yet more memories, most happy, burst in upon Elizabeth. She had spent many years, so very many, in these quaint environs. The town was so busy seeming to a girl running about who knew nowhere else. So empty and sedate to a woman accustomed to the capital's unending and (on occasional occasions) unnerving bustle. Her carriage trundled through the town, and Elizabeth looked about eagerly.

Many signs had changed in the seven years past. The haberdasher and the milliner had switched shops. Where the chandler stood, a greengrocer. But her favorite! The old circulating library and bookseller was still in the same place.

Elizabeth determined she would visit Mr. Martin soon.

Despite herself Elizabeth could not help but grin with an honest enthusiasm which made the ironic tones in her mind fade away. The old memories delighted her far more than they pained her. Twenty years of happiness could not be undone by two months of misery.

In essentials Meryton was exactly as it always had been, though a few new built brick structures on the edges of the town had joined the brown and white timber framed buildings that had been there for centuries.

A group of children played in a field, running back and forth as they chased each other, happily laughing.

She grinned, this happiness at old associations long unseen unstoppably bubbling through her. Alas, not all her thoughts were so delighted, for a terrified part of our heroine — Elizabeth also tended to refer to herself in her internal monologue with such an appellation on rare, pompous, occasions — a part of her that was not yet one and twenty, a part of her which had never stopped hurting at the fervent belief her neighbors adopted in her guilt, feared they would recognize her, and despise her again.

Elizabeth took a deep breath, full of the clean country air, with just a touch of manure from one of the pasture fields in the scent.

She smiled.

Nothing maudlin. Not today. The cloudy October weather which promised cold sprinkles would burst forth any moment was far too fine for her to be maudlin in. At least for a few months it would be good to be home once more.

And there the old house was.

Longbourn was a fine compact structure all in red brick. The sort of structure in which those gentry of middling stature, the backbone, or so insisted the newspapers which depended upon their subscriptions, of England would reside. A manor house that had seen a few generations, but which yet was modern enough that the young heirs would not be talking about how it was time to knock the old pile over and begin anew in the hallowed name of Improvement.

A half dozen smokestacks merrily belched thin wisps of smoke into the air. A welcoming sight to the returning authoress.

When the carriage pulled up to the manor house, Elizabeth gathered up her calf skin notebook where she kept the pages of whatever she was working on. During the day she scribbled ideas in pencil onto the sheets and then she later copied them out in ink for the working copy.

The door was opened by her dear old Papa. He smilingly extended out his arm, and he helped Elizabeth to step down from the carriage. "Lizzy, home at last! Home!"

Elizabeth exuberantly embraced her father and then looked at him.

He smiled back at her.

Papa looked older. She'd somehow never noticed when he visited her in London. But his hair had been darker, and his skin firmer when seven years before he saw her off to town, standing in this very place and waving.

The sort of nervous feeling felt at seeing the effect of age on her father launched Elizabeth again into that way of thinking: Whilst our heroine's father was not elderly, he no longer could be said in frank honesty to be in the middle course of a man's life.

"Lizzy! My dear, dear Lizzy!" Mrs. Bennet seized Elizabeth and hugged her tightly, disrupting any maudlin meanderings. "My dear, dear daughter! Lord! Home at last! I have missed you so."

Mama looked younger, happy and relaxed. She'd never used to look relaxed.

Such was the effect, Elizabeth supposed, of four daughters married.

That terrible fear had haunted her mother for many a year, that fear of starving alone, with her daughters, in the hedgerows, unwanted and unaided by any of her many relations, not a one of whom would deign to lift a finger to help their blood relation, with only the insufficient support to keep life in the bones of the income off five thousand in the four percents. The marriage of four daughters, even if not a one had married well had relieved that never particularly reasonable fear from her mother.

Mama bustled Elizabeth inside. "Lord! So unfashionable. That dress! Was it ever even in fashion for the season? As though you'd come from some cheap rural village, not London! Mr. Bennet said he always sends you allowance sufficient for dresses — what have you spent that money on? We must go to the dressmaker tomorrow. Order something in the latest fashion for you. I'll not have my daughter look so dowdy — everything is prepared for you, Lizzy — your room is nice and warm. You shall feel entirely at home again."

The more Mama talked the quieter Elizabeth felt. In seriousness she did not want to be fashionable again, especially not here. "I hope I shall."

"The same, the very same! Everything is the same. Heavens, you do look brown — I thought you spent all your days inside scribbling?" Mrs. Bennet frowned at her. "You are quite freckled."

Elizabeth laughed. "One might, if they have a pencil and paper, scribble out of their doors with even greater facility than inside of their doors — you know, like the poets."

"Not respectable people." Mrs. Bennet sniffed. "Poets are not respectable at all. You'll give off from scribbling I hope, now that you are living back here where you belong."

Elizabeth shook her head, smilingly. "Not at all, Mama. Not at all."

Mr. Bennet laughed. "You'll not convince your mother to be happy with anything that reeks of the bluestocking."

"Lord, it is so exciting!" Mama clapped her hands briskly. "To reintroduce you to all our friends. Tomorrow we shall call on the Lucases, and the Gouldings and Mr. Kelton — you must know that Mr. Kelton rents from Mr. Long, I am sure I have told you three times, if I have told you once, about him."

"Showing me off to the neighborhood?" Elizabeth looked around the drawing room. It looked smaller than her memories. A strange and sudden anxiety stabbed through her.

Our heroine did not want to see everyone again. She didn't want to see them.

"Lizzy, do you like what I have done with the room? All the furniture and wallpaper new in the room, right after Kitty married. According to the latest patterns in the magazines. Is it like the drawing rooms you have seen in London?"

"Very like," Elizabeth replied with only a weak pretense of enthusiasm. Our heroine would have far rather seen everything as it had once been.

Mama took the fabric of Elizabeth's dress between her fingers. "Heavens. Heavens. This would not do at all. You must have a visiting dress. Perhaps one with a modern cut… you know how fashions have changed so much these past years, since our victory. You must have not wished to add to the wear of your good travelling dress…" Mrs. Bennet trailed off, looking almost forlorn.

Elizabeth took a deep breath. She was not that woman. She no longer was scared of any social disapprobation, and she had proven to herself and to the world that she was of value. Besides, in literary circles in London, amongst people who knew at least rumors of the story of her with Wickham, she was very well liked. "I have one or two visiting dresses that are better, though nothing that would be the height of London fashion, but I think I shall meet your hopes."

Papa snorted.

"Now, Lizzy, be quiet, ladylike and sweet — they all remember how wild and hoydenish you were. If you want friends here, you must show them you are quite chastened."

"Oh, I am quite as chaste as I ever was!" Elizabeth replied laughing.

Poor Mama frowned at her, and Elizabeth embraced her in return.

Mama was who she was: a wavy spirited woman of weak understanding. "I promise, I shall be on the best of my behavior with whichever of your friends you have convinced to accept my visit."

"They are your friends too," Mrs. Bennet said, almost hotly.

Elizabeth just shook her head.

That evening, Elizabeth joined her learned father in his packed book room for conversation whilst Mama busied herself with uselessly officiating over the cookery of their cook. This room was oh so dearly and painfully familiar. That smell books got as they became old, the lingering odor of tobacco pipe on the air, the strong scent of the coffee her father drank while reading.

It was as though she were a child who sat adoringly at her father's knee again.

The leaden sky of a proper English afternoon seen through the drafty windows was the favorite view of her childhood. And furthermore the fireplace with its modest marble mantelpiece was an old friend. A bit black with ash around the edges as Mr. Bennet was by no means dedicated to having it cleaned regularly. Heirloom paintings of little famed family forebears hung on the walnut paneled walls.

Elizabeth could imagine she was fifteen, eagerly stealing Papa's copy of Shakespeare to whisper the words of the Taming of the Shrew or As You Will to herself. She'd always been the sort of light trifling girl who greatly preferred the comedies to the tragedies. From such beginnings she had now grown, like a thorny weed, into the worst sort of person: A light trifling author whose heroines never died tragically.

Elizabeth ran her fingers along the spines of the books: Hello old, dear friends! And hello yet to be read for the first time new friends.

There was an entire new set of bookshelves on one wall where there used to be paintings, and the table in the corner was piled five high with books. The proper abode of such a man as her father. Though so many books must have run to a great cost.

"Well, Lizzy. Well," Papa said smilingly, gaining her attention, "you can see I follow all the latest girlish trends."

"Oh!" Elizabeth squealed with honest delight looking at the desk. There was a modest pile of books there. All in three volumes, the original editions — each one penned by A Gentlewoman. She had vacillated for two days between that and A Lady, but she had respected the late Miss Austen too much to choose her nom de plume in the end. "I can see," Elizabeth said smiling at Papa, "that they have been read through — has Mama perused them?"

"A little, only — she disapproves rather of your writing habit. The same sort of thing, etcetera, etcetera. She has no desire for others to know that you do something so unconventional as to write novels."

"Ah!" Elizabeth placed a hand against her cheek. "Am I then to understand that I am not known far and wide, and of more importance, near and close as an author of great repute for the writing of many trifling tales with which one might trifle their idle days away with?"

"I fear not — I thought of making a rumpus upon it, just to oppose Mrs. Bennet's insistence that I say nothing, but—" Mr. Bennet wryly held his hands apart. "Eh, too much of an effort. It's not so much fun as it used to be to tease her. Her nerves bother her less these days."

Elizabeth could not help but make a face. But she loved both her parents, and if she accepted Mama's faults for what they were, she ought to as well accept Papa for his flaws. "Vanity demands the question — is A Gentlewoman of any popularity or notoriety in Meryton?"

"Amongst silly girls? I believe so. I was once caught by Maria Lucas — now Smith, you know. But she still lives in Meryton, and—"

"Goodness." Elizabeth waved a discouraging finger at Papa. "No, no. Not like that. You sound half like a letter from Mama when you speak that way! As if the key fact of importance in the tale is that I know who has married and who has not. When the only matter that has any significance to me is if Maria liked the book — Charlotte knows of course, but I enjoined her to not tell the rest."

"She did. But your fame under the name of Bennet in the neighborhood is still principally established by that silliness with that officer." Mr. Bennet grimaced. "Nothing to be done about that — I only assume it is yet talked about. No one says anything to me. But what do we live for but to make sport of our neighbors and in our turn be made sport of by them? You may depend upon it, now that you are returned, that rendezvous in the hunting lodge shall be the chiefest matter of conversation for a fortnight at the least."

"Shall I be scorned yet by all and sundry for my youthful misdeeds, and will they lock up the young girls, lest I ruin their morals, and shall every married matron stab dagger eyes towards me out of frightened fear I will take their faithless husbands astray?"

Our heroine had determined that she would rise to every challenge with a laugh and a bright smile.

"Lizzy, I have hopes that you are now such an old maid that any worries of that sort will be gone."

"Ah! No, alas, I fear from my acquaintance with the female of our species, which is greater than yours, that my age will simply mark me as having greater appetites and more conspicuous concupiscence."

Mr. Bennet giggled, and then tried to make his face stay straight in response to the unmanly sound of amusement.

"What?" She smiled unrepentantly at her father.

"A horrid alliteration. I raised you better than that!"

But rather than the proper laughter of two persons dear to one another conversing once more in familiar environs, Papa's comment made Elizabeth remember.

What a fool she had been. She had been so disappointed with her father. She had felt for a long time that he had thrown her off, tossing her to London, because it was easier than fighting the neighborhood on her behalf.

Of course Papa could not have done more. What after all could a mere father do against the vicious, violent delight of delicious gossip?

"Such horrid jokes," Elizabeth said, at last wryly having shaken off that memory of anger at Papa, "are considered quite the height of fashion amongst the poets of town. Literary circles — if one cannot turn every phrase into an abominable pun, then one will be quite despised by the more sophisticated set. So you see, my authorship ought to destroy my reputation were it known. Far more than that silliness with Wilted Wicky — I promise to make a pretense of being a rural country girl having no knowledge of how to rub two words together."

Mr. Bennet laughed, though he watched her carefully. He knew her well enough to detect the note of falseness in her smile. "Glad you are home. Glad. Lizzy, home, back where you belong."

"Do I? — with such alliterations, witticisms, and clevernesses as I compulsively make now, I suspect I would feel more at home in London once more. I promised I shall make a decent go of it here, and I shall. Papa, we really have spent little time together these last years."

**Merry Christmas everyone! **

**Here is my newest novel, that I'm posting here so that those of my readers here who buy books on Amazon or use Kindle Unlimited can know that it exists. If you don't, put it on follow, and I'll probably start posting it here in about a year and a half. There should be one more chapter that I post in the sample in about a week.**


	2. Chapter 2

The afternoon before the assembly ball that he was obligated to attend as Mr. Bingley's resident friend, Fitzwilliam Darcy watched Bingley play with his young son, waving a toy around the nine month old's head that made the baby give a delighted squeal and reach up to bat at the rattler. This little creature's birth had ended the life of Mr. Bingley's beloved wife, but Bingley showed no resentment towards little Charlie for that.

Watching the domestic happiness of his friend had begun to kindle in Darcy himself over the past years his own desire for a wife and children to play with and dangle from his knee, and help to learn to ride and fight.

Darcy liked to watch Bingley with his child; most men were quite distant from their children, at least until they were old enough to speak and walk.

From the way the Bingleys' other child, Harriet, held herself back from playing with her tiny brother, Darcy suspected she did blame him a little for her mother's death.

Mr. Bingley's sister, Louisa Hurst, preferred to play with the niece to the nephew, claiming an abhorrence of infants — a matter that Darcy knew was not her native habit, as she had been a devoted mother to both of her children when they were infants. Both had been killed by the fevers particularly common before the first year of age, as many children did.

It was often viewed as unwise to care much for a child until they had reached at least their first year, and perhaps not until they had reached their fifth year, at which time the odds of their death — according to the insurance tables — began to be similar to those of an adult in the prime of life.

Death was part of life, present everywhere. A man could only control himself, and his own behavior, not the future. And Fitzwilliam Darcy always controlled himself.

As Mrs. and Mr. Hurst had a comparatively modest income and no estate, they attached themselves to Mr. Bingley's establishment whenever possible. Darcy knew that though his sister sometimes annoyed him, Bingley liked having members of his family generally near and around.

Bingley's other sister had at last married three years before — Caroline Bingley had made herself decidedly tiresome in Darcy's eyes with her constant attempts to attract his interest through extravagantly agreeing with everything he said, and wearing clothes whose expense he knew ran past her fortune.

Miss Bingley, though a fine woman, and one whose marriage Darcy was glad to see, would not have been suitable as the wife of a man such as Fitzwilliam Darcy, and he lost nothing because she had married some six months before Darcy determined that he would marry himself and set upon the task of finding a suitable wife.

When Mr. Darcy made that momentous determination — one which seemed less and less momentous, and more mocking, as months — now years — passed without success in the matter of finding an appropriate woman — Darcy gave careful and extensive thought to the serious concern of what sort of woman he ought choose to serve as the companion of his future life, the mother of his children, and most significantly, the Mrs. Darcy of Pemberley.

Caroline Bingley would have been rejected simply because she spent too much, neither read nor thought much, and lacked a certain firmness of character. Also, she was a little lighter in the dowry and substantially less respectable in the breeding, despite Darcy's deep affection for Mr. Bingley, than ideal.

An exceptional man such as himself ought to marry an exceptional wife.

Darcy had always held himself chaste and behaved in all matters as a gentleman of probity, character and religious seriousness should. And in like serious manner Darcy dutifully embarked upon the task of finding a woman to marry. That first season after this determination he attended a dance every night for the first half of the sitting of parliament, and every second or third night for the second half, when he had gotten worn down and tired of the whole matter.

He went often to soirees and dinners with those of his acquaintance who had unmarried daughters or sisters. And then, after he had found all of their relations unsuitable in some respect, he had attended dinners and house parties, and gone on picnics, and done all matter of disagreeable socialization with the acquaintances of his acquaintances and friends.

His friends and family had put the news about town that the great fortune of Fitzwilliam Darcy was at last in want of a wife, and he endured the introductions to one pretty, accomplished, quick speaking and young debutante after another. Each woman Mr. Darcy met, he analyzed with serious care and serious concern. He inspected and questioned each to determine from their behavior during the dance and their answers to his questions if she was the one who was worthy to become his wife.

Darcy demanded the best from himself in all matters.

Darcy demanded honesty in his business dealings. He demanded himself to be a skilled sportsman. He demanded himself to be an astute scholar whilst in university. He demanded of himself to be the best of landlords. He demanded of himself to always face any task set before him and to excel.

He would acquire the perfect wife.

Darcy wrote down a list of traits that were generally admired in a wife, and he would find a woman who met all of them: His wife was to be of exceptional beauty; kind; of religious disposition; demure when appropriate. A confident and capable hostess, capable of making a witty splash in society. His wife would embrace the duties of being a Lady Beneficent to his tenants, and she would happily retire to the countryside when it was Darcy's preference to avoid London. Yet she also would be a helpmeet who would encourage him to go out amongst his acquaintances, building valuable connections and desire him to spend that time in society which was proper for a man of his position.

She would be a woman who was widely read, and who thought deeply about both matters in the feminine sphere and those which were of great importance that many thought were the sole province of men. She would have the full measure of accomplishments that a well-bred woman would have, and she would have something beyond that — an independence and individuality of mind that showed she was not merely a slave of fashion. She would be healthy, and she would be still young enough when they married to be considered fully in bloom.

Beyond all of these considerations, the wife of Fitzwilliam Darcy must have an irreproachable pedigree, the best of connections, and a large dowry.

Mr. Darcy was not actually a fool.

He would settle for less than all of this in a woman, but he was determined to find a woman who was better than the average his friends had found for themselves. Such was his duty to himself, to achieve all he could and to fulfill the potential and promise of his fine person, his fine mind, and his fine estate. Darcy had in fact met many young women who had many of the features and attributes he looked for. Enough that he certainly thought he should see them as accomplished, connected, clever, beautiful and dowered enough for a man such as himself to marry.

In those cases he had spent a decent amount of time — but not so much as to arouse premature expectations, merely expectations of expectations — around such women in conversation. And in every case, pursuing this particular woman did not… feel quite right. Each woman he'd met in the past three years of far too, too many balls had lacked in some respect.

Some essential respect.

On rare occasions Darcy thought that the essential matter missing might be in himself, not in the women he met. Perhaps he had a disinclination to be pleased.

However, upon sober and unbiased reflection, Darcy knew that he was not the problem. A perfect woman existed. A completely perfect girl, who met every requirement that actually mattered to him — i.e. connections, beauty, being well read, well spoken, and… all of them. And this girl, which he simply needed to continue to hunt for, she would also have that je ne sais quoi lacking in the women whose superficial features had been good enough for him to marry.

As he searched for his belle dame, as a true chevalier would, unceasing in the pursuit of his lady's hand, Darcy ought have been quite willing to go to any ball where there would be young ladies, not yet of his acquaintance, who might be the one.

However, Mr. Darcy was not eager to go to the crowded assembly rooms of a minor market town thirty miles from London, to be fawned over by every unwanted Miss and her mother as soon as they learned that the great Fitzwilliam Darcy, with his income of ten thousand a year, and very likely more — it was, indeed, more — had arrived.

They had been informed of the situation and prospects and connections of the principal families of the neighborhood prior to Bingley taking the estate, and no woman at the assembly ball would meet one of Darcy's primary requirements in a wife, that she be well connected, of impeccable breeding.

What chance was there to find a woman with excellent accomplishments or a first rate brain in such a locale? None at all! — both required a first rate education, paid for by the resources only available to the best families.

No, no. The best Darcy could hope to find in this assembly was a particularly pretty girl — the most beautiful of roses could blossom in the least prepossessing of neighborhoods. But what matter that to him?

Fitzwilliam Darcy was no shallow man, to only care about the appearance of a woman! Not he!

Darcy still went to the assembly ball, grumbling the whole way to amuse Bingley, who liked to imagine Darcy was even more asocial than he actually was.

In contrast to Darcy's half faux and half genuine distaste for the dancing that he looked forward to, Bingley looked more cheerful than Darcy had seen him since the death of Mrs. Bingley. He lolled back with his hands behind his head, taking up an entire corner of the large carriage, whistling the tune to a jig that had been popular seven years before.

The melancholy was still there. Whether Bingley was consciously aware of it or not, Darcy recognized that as the tune he'd been told many times was the music that the band had played the first time Mr. Bingley danced with Isabella.

Louisa Hurst said after they had sat in quiet for a minute. "I do not know what to expect — this shall be… quite a rustic assembly?"

"Oh, I dare say." Bingley straightened and he smirked at his sister. "I dare say it shall be. Filled with barbarians — Mr. Morris informed me when I took the place that they wear naught but the blue paint and loincloths with which their ancestors faced Caesar's legions. Eh — what think you, Darcy?"

"For my part," Darcy replied, "I believe the populace here was entirely replaced by the Anglo Saxons — so they do not descend from those ancient Britons who faced Caesar and his legions. However, whilst they likely are so modern as to wear untanned deer skin and wolf furs, they are not like to have learned any tongue any of us have hope to understand."

Mrs. Hurst huffed. "Both of you of a type. You know what I mean — they are not society."

"Hear. Hear," Mr. Hurst said in his rolling voice. "Never any good wine at a public ball."

The good gentleman's wife rather annoyedly looked at her husband as she absently pulled her sparkling grotesquely bejeweled bracelet up and down her arm. "The women will all toss their bonnets at you; you must be on your guard."

"I do not expect to meet anyone who could meet my standards here," Darcy said, imagining that she must be speaking to him. "But I thank you for the warning."

"No, not you," Mrs. Hurst said annoyedly — she had been considerably less polite to Darcy since Caroline nee Bingley had finally given up on her designs on Darcy and married a man of middling fortune, middling looks, middling height and less than middling sense. Darcy preferred the change. "I spoke to Charles. Mr. Darcy, everyone knows you will never marry, for no woman could ever meet your 'standards.'"

"I assure you I shall one day find the right woman."

"And then she shall not wish to marry you."

"Becalm yourselves, why do I need to be on my guard?" Bingley asked grinning. "Bonnets being thrown at me, you say? Sounds a terrible fate. Might lose an eye."

"You know what I mean — you must marry again for little Harriet and Charles's sake. But the women here shall not do. They are outside of society. You can't make a good match here."

"That is poor reasoning," Darcy said. "In general it is considered that a man with children should not expect to find so good of a wife for his second as he did for his first, as the resources of his estate shall in the larger part go to support the offspring of the first marriage."

Bingley rolled his eyes. "Darcy, you need to fall in love. Properly and deeply."

Louisa huffed. "Must you both be dense? I do not wish to see my brother make a brilliant match — someone so well connected as Isabella cannot be expected—"

"That was not why I married her. I would have married her had she not a farthing."

"For Heaven's sake, I hope not!" was his sister's instant reply. "I only want you to marry someone from good society."

"Here and arrived!" Bingley exclaimed as the carriage slowed to a stop. "Now to see what the women of this barbaric outpost from antediluvian times look like." He whistled. "Well, they do not lack for looks."

A pale short woman with brown hair who was yet young, though Darcy judged her with his well-studied eye for assessing potential wives to be likely past twenty and five, and thus too old to meet his requirements, walked past the carriage and into the assembly hall. She had a tasteful though slightly too low-cut dress that was somewhat out of the mode — another mark against her. Darcy did not care for himself: she looked absolutely lovely in the dress and it clung close and nice to her curves. But the wife of Darcy must provide no opportunity for the censure of others.

The woman's mother pulled her to a stop and pointed to make the young woman look at their carriage.

Her eyes met Darcy's, brown, sparkling and glinting in the fading light of sunset.

Something leaped in Darcy's throat and stomach that he did not understand, and that he did not remember feeling with all of the childlike debutantes he had tried to interest himself in over the past years. He had perhaps never felt any such thing since the infatuations of his late boyhood.

And then she looked away and hurried into the assembly hall, and Darcy blushed. That moment, such as it had been, was gone.

"Lovely girl," Bingley said as he climbed out of the carriage. "Lovely and lovely. Did not see her when I returned the calls of the gentlemen who knocked on my door since I've settled here — I'll seek an introduction. Darcy, do you want to claim first dance with her? I saw your eyes meet."

"No. No," Darcy replied once his feet were on the solid sober cobblestones once more. "Lovely as she was, I can already see she would be entirely unsuitable as a wife to me. I give you leave to pursue her as you—"

Darcy's magnanimous dismissal of his interest in the unknown miss was cut off by a half shriek of laughter. The girl… woman… beautiful human being stood there, not three feet away from Darcy, having stepped back out of the assembly hall for some reason. Her eyes danced with something, either anger or humor, and Darcy could not judge which.

She coughed gigglingly, and then bobbed her head to Darcy, Mr. Bingley and Mrs. Hurst. She ignored Mr. Hurst by accident. She smiled, and Darcy, against his will, could not keep from feeling a jump in his stomach at being smiled at in that way by that girl. He returned her smile, though he did not mean to.

Without a word she returned into the ballroom.

"Well, Darcy," Bingley said amicably. "I certainly shall beg a dance from that woman. Though from how her eyes lingered, you are more to her taste — Jove, I would not be so fastidious as you for a kingdom."

"Nonsense," Mrs. Hurst said, quietly as they had just been made aware they could be overheard, "that dress is years and years out of date."

"Her eyes drove any such thought from my mind. And her other assets." Bingley grinned. "She wore the dress, even if it is antediluvian, very well."

Darcy felt a frisson of something like jealousy and irritation at Bingley's admiration of the woman.

Absurd.


End file.
